Women and Social Movements: Development and the Global South, 1919–2019 examines efforts to foster gender equity through expanded economic and social participation of women on a global scale. Covering a century, the database highlights and evaluates activism through individual efforts, organizational initiatives, and socio-cultural projects led by or for women in the Global South. It shows how women have negotiated power and status regarding private or public programs centered on their rights and social inclusion. Stressing the historical problem of the “feminization of poverty,” coupled with women’s invisibility within most foreign aid regimes and approaches to technical assistance, the project documents how women and their allies worked to balance economic growth and social improvement while navigating equity and the fairer allocation of resources. Accompanying essays by leading scholars in the field outline and critique significant shifts in approaches to development, including that of a gendered “post-development” perspective.

Edited by a Scholar

Jill Jensen, University of Redlands Jill Jensen teaches courses on the history of capitalism, business ethics, workers in the global economy, and the history of work. She has published several articles on the history of the United Nations and the International Labor Organization (ILO), particularly on U.S. perspectives regarding inter-governmental institutions, international human rights, comparative social policy, and women’s work and gender. She is an editor with Nelson Lichtenstein of the volume, The ILO from Geneva to the Pacific Rim: West Meets East (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and now the editor of the forthcoming Alexander Street/ProQuest's Women and Social Movements: Development and the Global South, 1919-2019.

Advisory Board

Eloisa Betti, University of Bologna​

Eileen Boris, University of California, Santa Barbara​

Babacar Fall, Cheikh Arita Diop University of Dakar​

Devaki Jain, Development Alternatives for Women for a new Era (DAWN) and Delhi University​

Rebecca Plant, University of California, San Diego​

Kathryn Kish Sklar, Professor Emerita, State University of New York at Binghamton​

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, University of California, Irvine

Sample documents

• Socialist Development Experience: Women in Rural Production and Reproduction in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and Tanzania, discussion paper, Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex (IDS), September 1979.​
• Womanwise: A Popular Guide and Directory to Women and Development In the Third World
• Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law, and Development: Women's rights, human rights: Asian women's profile, 1993​
• All India Association for Christian Education: How to Start and Manage Women's Development and Research Centres: A Manual, 1999​
• Women in Development Europe (WIDE) newsletter​
• International Labour Organization:​
  • Mary Elizabeth Pidgeon, Trends in the Employment of Women, 1928-36, 1938​
  • Women in Rural Development: the People's Republic of China, 1979​
  • Elizabeth Croll, Women in Rural Development: Critical Issues, 1980​
  • Proceedings of the National Workshop on Employment, Equality, and Impact of Economic Reform on Women, New Delhi 1993